19 Comments

Semantically they are the same. Some people will tell you that there is a slight difference in magnitude (大きな meaning a little bit "bigger" than 大きい), but I have found no evidence of that in any grammar book. None of my Japanese friends and colleagues confirmed that either.

Grammatically, 大きな / 小さな are a bit special version of rentaishi (連体詞, so-called "na-adjectives"). Special in a sense that unlike other rentaishi you may only use them as adnominals but not in predicates (for historical reasons, apparently).

In other words, you may only say 大きな connected to a substantive, e.g. 大きな箱, but not at the end of a sentence, so something like 箱が大きだ is a no-go. Instead, say 箱が大きい（です）.

I would translate と as "or" in this context, since you are being asked to pick one.

Also, いい has quite a few possible translation. I'd be inclined to use "agreeable" in this case, although "good" does work.

So, "Big box or little box, which (of these) is agreeable?"

The sentence does not specify "you" or "do you" at all. You could translate いい as "prefer" or "prefered" but it is a stretch. There are better ways of expressing your preferences in Japanese but it would probably require higher level grammar than what Duolingo has covered to this point.

I think it is more natural to translate と as “and” when the enumeration of objects comes before the question. But sure there are exceptions if we replace the objects with more complex phrases, e.g. “We can go to the park or watch a movie. Which do you prefer?” (just personal taste)

The reason why が isn't acceptable here is that どっち is the subject of the sentence, not 箱, therefore どっち is linked to the predicate (いいですか). Multiple subjects are acceptable only in compound sentences, and this is not a compound sentence.

The verb should be at the end in a Japanese sentence. In this case, the "verb" is the copula, desu. So desu ka needs to be at the end and the rest should appear at some point prior to that.

Generally speaking, Japanese is much more flexible about word order, compared with English, because the particles indicate grammatical relationships, rather than the word order itself. However, there are still some restrictions and common sentence patterns.